Later it happened again. I dreamt of Carral’s golden hair locks twisting around me like a warm golden exoskeleton. When I woke up, our bodies were clammy and damp. The mattress stank of urine. Warm, thin fluid trickled onto my hand next to her thigh, and I thought about tea with milk and sugar. I could hear the water drip from the ceiling, from the walls, from every corner, and I thought that it dripped with us, for us.

Eden

Eden

THE NEXT MORNING the storm had abated, but a torrential rain followed it and the air in the brewery became ever more damp and clammy. Carral was still sleeping when I got up. Her smooth, newly shaved head was beaded with sweat. On the way to the bathroom I felt rainwater drip on me through cracks in the tin roof, and the living room mezzanine was covered with a thin white layer of moss that couldn’t be scraped off. I could only barely make out the street below. There were no people, no trams, and I couldn’t even see the tracks, as if all of Aybourne had been rubbed out overnight.

The compost was still beneath the stairs. The stench of rotten fruit had spread through the entire flat. It felt like the brewery had been transformed into a big wet tank that was waiting for Carral and I to decompose within it: a rotten, reeking Garden of Eden. The apples were in the bin where we’d left them, mouldy and collapsed. Flies with long legs buzzed around a torn dark-red Bloody Ploughman. The Honeygold next to it had its peel intact, like a shrivelled urine-coloured pearl. Some of the apples were unrecognisable, covered in grey-white fur like little dead animals. And under them, in the far corner of the apple pile, I noticed something different: a notebook, yellowed and soft. I recognised the colour: it was Pym’s notebook. Did Carral put it there? I thought while I fished it out and brushed off the worst of the mould stains. Then I hauled the compost behind me through the factory and lugged it to its usual spot outside the front door, chucked the notebook in my backpack and walked towards the university. As I walked it felt like the rotten apples were rolling behind me, braided together to form a sticky yellow-brown trail.

That night I brought the notebook to the bathroom. The honey mushroom sat with its head on the bathtub edge. It had changed colour and was a deep yellow, almost black. While I ran the bath, I sat down to read the book. The mushroom leant against my shoulder and read with me in silence.

Pym’s little novel started with the same verses that I remembered from that night around the kitchen table:

The biologist creates the world;

The world of biology.

Puts emotion in honey jars with spiders and bees.

Can’t see the difference between people and trees.